Rossi

Rossi is one of the first major ventures to bring briar pipe making to an industrial scale in Italy. The business, founded in 1886 by Ferdinando Rossi, one of Northern Italy's leading tobacco-products wholesalers, grew up in Barasso in the province of Varese and, between the two world wars, reached a size that made it the world's largest pipe factory.

From Wholesaling to Factory

Rossi's business at first was not making pipes but selling them; he knew the workshops he bought from closely. In those years the bulk of Italian pipes were still hand-shaped one by one within family homes, mostly from boxwood or olive wood. Having seen how briar was worked in series on the bench in the French town of Saint-Claude, Rossi decided to establish the same arrangement in his own country. But the details of these benches were knowledge the Saint-Claude workshops guarded jealously; the machines could not be bought as a set, but were assembled piece by piece from various sources and modified until they became usable.

The founding is dated to 1886. Records diverge on whether the business began directly in Barasso or first in a trading house in Milan; what is certain is that by the turn of the century, production had settled in Barasso and the staff numbered 120. This rise also triggered the birth of new workshops in the area: founders such as Gerolamo Ceresa (1897), Fratelli Lana (1900), Stefano Santambrogio (1910), and the Rovera brothers (1911) had earlier worked for Rossi or done contract work for it. The Varese area thus became the center of the Italian pipe industry.